Hi Mike. There's nothing wrong with starting out with DPP and getting to know it. After all it's free and it works well as a raw converter. There are some quite good tutorials around, you could try the Canon website at
http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/controller?ac...&fromTips=1.
I purchased Lightroom for it's database management, particularly when travellling, and after using it once never went back to DPP, so I don't know the capabilities of ver. 3.4. (I found LR more intuitive, much faster, better thought out and ultimately more capable).
If you want to correct lens distortion PTLens is reasonably priced and comes in stand-alone and plug-in versions.
When you come to the stage of wanting to do local editing on your images get a trial version of Elements and see if it suits you. I started out with another program, and found that while it worked to a point, I couldn't talk to other photographers about issues with its capabilities, so I bought Photoshop. The learning curve has been, um, steep, but I only had to do it once. Cheers, David